lan Bishop really, really likes radio. He's obviously spent a great deal of time listening to it, and, in his many sound collage albums, he's proven that he has something to say about it. Seattle-based Sublime Frequencies has recently released a number of sound collages (most of which were recorded in the 1980s but recently mixed and mastered), including Radio Palestine, Radio Syria and the work under examination here, Radio Morocco.

In case you were wondering, sound collage is the act of taking a variety of sound sources—in Bishop's case, radio fragments like songs, commercials, news bulletins and so on—and mixing them together to create a new work of art. This new artwork is similar to those mix albums created by DJs, but there's one difference here. Bishop's source material is culled from a specific place and a specific time. In a way, Bishop's collages are part DJ mix, part field recording.

Personally, I've never been that impressed by DJ mixes. Sure, they can be fun, but there are too many variables and potential roadblocks preventing me from fully appreciating and enjoying the music, be it the individual songs, the mix, the sequencing or something else. At some level, mix albums always disappoint me. Field recordings, by contrast, always fascinate me, as they open my ears up to sounds created in a variety of different cultures and times. I never grow tired of listening to field recordings, be they documents of musicians sitting around a café singing songs or of people wandering around a street shouting into the darkness. There's just something fascinating about recordings that were never planned and so never seem staged, the way most music does.

To me, Bishop's work is best when the field recording aspect is emphasized, in contrast to the DJ mix: that is, when the collage seems to capture the spontaneous nature of radio as a listener wanders from one station to the next. In an earlier review of Radio Palestine, I noted that the album was a dizzying array of sounds from all corners of the world, from traditional Arab music to Tears for Fears and everything in between. However, I ultimately found the sporadic, jumbled nature of this album too hyperactive, too jumpy. There was something too artificial about the frantic pacing, the shifting (every few seconds) to a new source. To me, it sounded less like the true experience of someone shifting from station to station on a radio in Palestine in the mid-80s; rather, it sounded like a mix album culled from mid-80s radio signals. There was, in short, too much DJ mix, too little field recording.

Radio Morocco is another story. This is the real thing. This is what I wished Palestine had been: a true sampling of radio culture in Morocco in 1983. I think it helped that Bishop recorded all of these signals from the same place (Morocco, obviously) at the same time (the summer of 1983). There are a wide variety of sounds on this disc—from traditional Moroccan and Arab musics to Arab pop music to news broadcasts to English football highlights to a bunch of other things. But the pace here is slower—meaning that, instead of five second samples of different works, we get thirty, fifty, ninety second samples. These longer fragments allow us, first and foremost, to fully appreciate the musical richness of this corner of the world, a corner right at the edge between the Islamic and Christian worlds. The music here—from the sublime to the banal—is fascinating and memorable in its own right. I've heard a lot of Arab music, and even I was surprised by the rich variety and intricate subtleties culled together here.

Bishop's mix of these various sounds, too, is impressive. Not only does he give us nice, juicy clips from a variety of works, but also he manages to link these works together in ways that are amusing, insightful and entirely familiar. The familiarity, I think, is the key here. He throws an Arab love song into the mix, then splices in DJ banter, followed by a quick news brief, followed by a traditional Arab instrumental, followed by more DJ banter. To me, the pacing here allows me to feel like a radio listener in Morocco in 1983, as I listen to a song for a while, get bored, switch to a different station to hear a different songs, get bored again, switch to another station, and so on.

This kind of effortless pacing, no doubt, did not come easily: Bishop probably went to a lot of trouble to create an album that seemed so natural. But the work paid off, and the result is a rich, complex, and ultimately rewarding examination of sound, radio, and a specific musical moment. This is radio art of the highest order.